December is a popular month for software releases judging by the number of announcements in this week’s post. There’s also an article about the use of CFD to study respiration in reptiles. The image shown here is from an article announcing a mathematical proof of a fundamental law of turbulence that you’ll probably want to read.

Intelligence

Mathematicians have proved Batchelor’s Law which describes how temperature variations are distributed in a fluid. The proof required expertise in PDEs, probability, dynamical systems, and chaos theory.

The UK Fluids Conference 2020 will be held at the University of Southampton on 1-3 September 2020. Abstracts are due 17 April.

A very cool architectural use of facets, or “fractals” as the article refers to them, on this “tectonic” wall. Image from architect magazine.com.

Fluids

For 100 years, researchers have been flummoxed by the fact that bubbles in narrow tubes don’t rise while in wider tubes they rise easily to the top. It took an undergraduate student to reveal why. [Spoiler alert: they do rise but v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.]

FYFD has this cool GIF (pronounced jiff) of adaptive mesh refinement and a video of more. Image from fyfluiddynamics.com.

Again with the squares?

I know what you’re thinking, but hear me out. Byron Kim, the artist responsible for the work below, was just awarded the Robert De Niro, Sr. Prize, given annually to a mid-career painter. Kim is described as one of today’s foremost abstract painters.